He complained about the high price of parking. He disputed the President's numbers in a "cordial" but "tense" public meeting on the topic. He turned over the research documenting his numbers. Two and a half weeks later, the provost fired him, explaining that Tarleton State University would not "tolerate intolerable behavior."
@rspfau@vfrmedia@gemlog@petersuber@academicchatter
Thanks for this link. People who sign up for leadership positions in higher ed and have not the smallest tolerance for dissent or discomfort are truly baffling to me. I hope this (by all accounts) fine teacher lands well somewhere else.
Last year on Mastodon we featured this story from the BBC about Gladstone's Library, the U.K.'s only residential library. Fediverse folk were so enthusiastic that when we discovered the library is offering scholarships to be taken in 2025, we had to share the information (see the second link in this post for all the details).
@CultureDesk@bookstodon It is worth warning folks who are thinking of visiting that it is full of the raceism (both casual and overt) of the time. Think carefully who you take there and go with that in mind.
@petersuber@academicchatter It's a bit strange that most of the Nature commentary goes out of its way to quote other Chinese scientists who claim things are not that bad, actually.
I've gotten to that delirious, sleep-deprived point of the submission process where looking up a list of species names has me thinking that "Gorilla gorilla gorilla" is something I need to share with other humans.
This episode’s guest is Dr Anne Pasek, Canada Research Chair in Media, Culture, and Environment, and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and the School of the Environment at Trent University. Dr Pasek is co-founder of the Low Carbon Research Methods Group, and she talks to Ariel all about what Low Carbon Research is (and can look like!), the “carbon footprint” of academic research, new innovative ways for research to respond to the climate crisis, the importance of zines, and even hosting her own solar server in her backyard!
@hoare_spitall@bibliolater@bookstodon i find them greatly dissimilar, unless he was molesting teenagers he brought along for the ride? No?
Didn't think so, or YOU would've spoken up, or at least refused to go along with it silently, and certainly not defending him when the truth came to light
@whatzaname@bibliolater@bookstodon
I'm not defending anybody, not even me. But I am aware that sometimes prima facie situations appear to be other than they are, and I have also learned to wait until all the pieces of the jigsaw are on the board before deciding what the picture shows.
@AlexSanterne@academicchatter I don’t think scientists have changed because people haven’t changed, and man is the history of science littered with petty shit
Isn't it weird that acceptance rate is a thing we look for in a conference/journal?
Publishing a paper should not be competitive like "we take the top 20% paper", it should be "we take all papers that are good enough according to our standards". Sometimes it can be a very low or very high number depending on the quality of the paper submitted.
@solalnathan@TEG@academicchatter@phdstudents sadly LLMs have made paper mills overwhelmingly efficient. Even before, the imbalance between authors and reviewers posed constraints to the number of papers that can be carefully evaluated: now it is getting worse. In this context, the acceptance rate makes even less sense (cheap submissions drive it artificially down) as a proxy for reviewing quality and selectivity. But I believe the whole process is not sustainable anymore. Alternatives anyone?
The president of #Barnard College lost a faculty-wide vote of no confidence on Tuesday, as criticism mounts over the school’s response to a pro- #Palestine 🇵🇸 encampment
It is the first no confidence vote against a president in the college’s history.
What will change for academic institutions as the climate crisis is increasingly not some far-off future, but happening now? And are we preparing our students for these uncomfortable conversations?
Well, generally the best cooling shelters for cattle (and sheep, and just about any living being for that matter) are trees ;) This is why agroforestry is one of the fields that I think we should be investigating- or one of the reasons, there are a lot of good reasons to stimulate agroforestry in terms of sustainability. It is gaining attention in the EU (though still very niche by comparison to intensive livestock farming).
I wrote an article for Unsustainable Magazine that is based around my dissertation research findings about what it means to wish for systems overhaul. The consequences of that desire are what I consider now in this article. It gets a bit personal; I am embedded within my own specific context and my observations come out of that situation.
@arielkroon Great article! One of the biggest secular apocalyptic movements of modern times is the transhumanists/TESCREALS and yes, I've seen much glee at punishment and unironic advocacy of genocide in those communities. Apocalypse for thee, utopia for me! Eco-doomerists and some degrowthers (not all) have shades of apocalyptic desire as well.
All of which just means we need more solarpunk stories for people to reorient their desires towards things worth fighting for.
students at College Unbound are AMAZING! Check out this #PressRelease about how they led the way in developing our #GenAI institutional policy! So cool to get to play a part in this!
So I just learnt that J Physiol requires figures to be made with Biorender (https://www.biorender.com/), a VC backed subscription SaaS extend and extinguish of scientists drawing pictures!
Is this a thing now!? Complete privatisation of the publication workflow!?
Am I the only one enraged by this!? Pictures? We could have just made our own shared repository of useful graphics. Our own open source software. Uggghhh!
Bizarre, yes, but as I said in the original thread, it seems well designed to trick researchers into thinking that it’s a standard that they may as well just use like MS Word.
A relatively tech illiterate lab leader will often just tell their students to use it in the same way they do everything else to please the journals. Because as far as they know illustration already works like documents and MS Word.
@maegul @NicoleCRust@academicchatter
I find all the bad PowerPoint illustrations in biology charming, but I personally take great pride in my illustrations in my work (probably wont be doing biology for the forseeable future) and it makes me sad when people dont, whether that be because they are pressed for time or bc they dont see communicating ideas visually as part of the task of science.
I have tried to introduce diagramming markup like mermaid or graphviz/dot ti my lab to limited success, they are just used to PowerPoint I guess. My cracked copy of illustrator 2019 is basically always open. Turning figure design into some drag and drop biorender task (in addition to the platform capture element as u say) is sad to me bc it feels like the final flattening of illustration as a proud tradition in biology.